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Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

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Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#441

Post by geekraver »

Wow, totally ignores the one framework Microsoft developed that was actually a pleasure to use (WinForms). Avalon sucked IMO; it was just a continuation of the fever dream at the time of making everything XML (or XAML in that case). MFC sucked because it was C++. WinForms was that brief Window of “modern programming language with simple, elegant GUI framework”.

I know it’s not a popular opinion, and I am sure there were reasons Microsoft abandoned it, but that was a brief few years when I actually enjoyed building GUIs on Windows.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#442

Post by khelavastr »

shiandow wrote: post #277

What I find must puzzling is that everyone seems to just be violating basic rules that had been in place for ages. Things like: - If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can - Menus should be tree structures - Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may…

Some Microsoft managers started suppressing people who reported internal defects, instead of leveling their teams up

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#443

Post by kerblang »

shiandow wrote: post #277

What I find must puzzling is that everyone seems to just be violating basic rules that had been in place for ages. Things like: - If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can - Menus should be tree structures - Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may…

> This meant I could start the computer, log in, potentially start and use several applications and only then turn on the screen.

I mean... well... responsiveness matters to me too, and I am impressed by such inspired productivity, but... I'm also confused. Why not turn on the screen - the monitor, right?

Now thinking about how gui lag might impact the sight-impaired, tangential as that is...

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#444

Post by dagmx »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #258
dagmx wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snide and subjective comments aside, you’ve clearly missed their point. Even if you take away subjective opinions on Liquid Glass, the point is that the core system updates things across the board. Unless apps have implemented custom drawing, you get a consistent-ish UI (for better or worse) across the system, whereas with windows you are beholden to whatever hodge podge of UI frameworks were chosen at the given time…

The size and losition of the traffic lights control is not dependent of the os the app runs on but on the os the app was compiled on. So things are not updated across the board

This is incorrect.

It’s still dependent on the OS it runs on AND the SDK it compiles against (not the OS it was was compiled on).

But that is legacy bridging behaviour, and is not compiled into the app. Apple can and do change those with time.

For example apps that compile against macOS 15 are not opted into Liquid Glass when run on macOS 26 but will be once on macOS 27 according to their transition docs.

That doesn’t really negate the OPs point.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#445

Post by hypersolo »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #317
shiandow wrote: post #277

What I find must puzzling is that everyone seems to just be violating basic rules that had been in place for ages. Things like: - If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can - Menus should be tree structures - Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may…

We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web. I would argue that desktop is the platform for power users, and its future depends on them. The keyboard shortcuts, the micro-interactions, the window management -- this stuff is all important when you're using a system for 8+ hours per day. Yet we r…

[flagged]

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#446

Post by hypersolo »

n8cpdx wrote: post #246
pipeline_peak wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What have you heard about SwiftUI being bloated?

My lived experience. Maybe bloated isn’t the right word, but attention to performance just isn’t there. Try using any swift UI app on iPhone or Mac. Try resizing a swift UI app window on Mac.

[flagged]

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#447

Post by pfdietz »

khelavastr wrote: post #442
shiandow wrote: post #277

What I find must puzzling is that everyone seems to just be violating basic rules that had been in place for ages. Things like: - If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can - Menus should be tree structures - Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may…

Some Microsoft managers started suppressing people who reported internal defects, instead of leveling their teams up

That sounds like Goodhart's Law in action.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#448

Post by vscode-rest »

Anamon wrote: post #284
vscode-rest wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Figma is far superior to the native apps it replaced. As is VS Code. Slack.

One could (and I would) argue that they achieved that despite their web-tech-based UIs, not because of. At least those of us who were around for the days when most apps were still native, do notice and get bothered by the input lag, for instance. Slack is, in fact, one of the worst offenders. It is so incredibly sluggish. And it doesn't need to be, when I compare it to the speed (and memory consumption) of Pidgin wit…

Their killer feature, being able to share a link with anyone at the company and instantly collaborate (live!), is made far easier on the web platform vs native. “The input lag” frankly does not matter in the big picture, imo.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#449

Post by vscode-rest »

u8080 wrote: post #440
vscode-rest wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s an example of a well made GTK or QT app in your opinion? And what would be the steel man Web app to compare that to?

Telegram Desktop (Qt)

We might contrast that with Slack, yes?

This thread comes to mind: https://www.0xsid.com/blog/wont-download-your-app With Slack that’s trivial, Telegram impossible.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#450

Post by dataflow »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #298
dataflow wrote: post #167

WPF was atrocious from the beginning and Microsoft absolutely did the right thing by not basing everything in Windows on it. Every WPF program was laggy and took ages to even start up (is everyone forgetting hard disk speeds?), partly due to it being managed code. The components didn't feel native either, and the coupling to managed code and garbage collection basically ensured all those would be perpetual issues. Ye…

I’m not sure I would blame the problems of WPF on managed code. After all we had snappy WinForms applications before WPF came along.

Kind of yes, kind of no:

- WinForms applications also took visibly longer to load than Win32. I didn't dread loading them nearly as much as WPF, yes, but I still did. They weren't what I'd call "snappy", but they were... usable enough.

- WinForms also stuttered (in my experience) with the GC. Again, not "snappy" in my experience, but this was more dependent on your use case.

- WinForms were .NET 2.0 rather than .NET 3.0, with fewer modules to load. It certainly felt more lightweight, which from my memory (of how the hard disk behaved) correlated with that.

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